Out of Time – adult historical fiction

Ccontemporary/historical fiction – with a fantasy element

Catherine Burns has given up everything to go and live in a cottage in the country and try and be a writer. Full of self-doubt, she is starting to realise this is not going to be easy. Then she meets Will, an enigmatic musician who seems to know rather a lot about her family and ancestors. As her relationship with Will develops, she goes on a historical journey, learning more about her female ancestors than she would ever have thought possible…

In about 2006 I had the rather unusual situation (for me) of having enough money to be a full time writer for at least six months. So I sat down to write a novel that was mainly contemporary but had historical fiction within it. Initially, I knew that I wanted to write about something that revolved around an old house, that included an element of family history, and had something a little quirky or magical about it. From those initial thoughts I came up with the enigmatic character of Will, who I originally thought of as a kind of time traveller (I had recently read Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife which gave me the confidence that such oddness could exist in a novel), but later modified into something a little different.

As the story developed, I realised that the story lightly covers the women’s history over the last two hundred years. But my main theme that I more consciously wanted to get across was the importance of following your dream, no matter what the obstacles, whether that is a career or a romantic love.